US and UK news and magazine-centric publishers can’t believe their luck in signing up to Apple News+. The app is now responsible for boosting traffic and generating an estimated $300-400mn of revenue from subscribers. As if to underline the potential, not only for the app’s continuing growth but also (perhaps) its challenge to the independence of media companies, next month it’s launching Apple News+ Food.
Insiders have said it will resemble the New York Times Cooking app with which users can also save recipes, scroll through curated sections, search for recipes in diverse categories and view them in an easy-to-follow format. An estimated 1-2mn NYT subscribers are said to pay only for its Cooking content.
The world’s most successful newspaper brand, which is not itself on Apple News+ (even though its Athletic and Wirecutter apps are) will find itself competing directly with receipes, restaurant reviews and food content aggregated from multiple publishers including Dotdash Meredith’s Allrecipes, Food & Wine and Real Simple, and also publications from Hearst, Condé Nast, Daily Telegraph, and Immediate Media’s Good Food.
This week, Apple launched a new London channel to give subscribers access to local news, politics, arts, sport, business and property. In the year when the UK capital lost its only evening newspaper and a raft of newsletters and other media are rushing to fill the gap, this is another demonstration of the publishing strategy of Apple News+. It follows the five-year-old US local channels available in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Houston.
Perhaps the locals and the Food initiative are also an indication of just how much longterm change Apple News will eventually impose on publishers. An app that might once have looked like a profit-earning ancillary and/or transitional platform increasingly looks like the future of so many magazine and newspaper brands. But it’s not another Facebook-like platform horror story because Apple News+ is a lucrative platform on which many publishers will increasingly come to depend. And, for many brands, it now looks much more like the future than merely a part of it.
Apple News is pre-loaded on millions of devices worldwide but is currently only available in the US, UK, Australia and Canada, including a version in French Canadian. It’s an ‘invite only’ platform that is curated by editors and algorithms that surface stories from publishers including The Atlantic, Wall Street Journal and The Telegraph. Apple News+ now has over 400 brands and charges $12.99 / £12.99 a month for a bundled subscription that gives users access to publishers’ paywalled articles. In the 12 months ending March 2024, 24% of Apple buyers said they had used Apple News. Publishers reportedly get 50% of subscription revenue from Apple, based on how much time subscribers spend with their content.
But you can feel the potential conflict in the pre-existing strategies of media companies participating in Apple News+. While they share in multi-million revenue streams with little expense or risk and are able to boast to advertisers about huge growth in digital ‘subscriptions’, the publishers don’t get access to any of the usual data about subscribers. The companies that, especially in newsstand-dominated markets, have contemplated a future where data-rich, direct-to-consumer subscriptions supplanted retail intermediaries, are being forced to come to terms with a changed world. In the UK, this ‘All You Can Read’ already accounts for 25% of all magazine subscriptions. Presumably, the share will grow as consumers realise that Apple News+ is often better value than digital subscriptions direct from the publisher.
But publishers have plenty to smile about.
Many really can’t believe their luck in being able (suddenly) to grow revenues after almost two decades of unending decline. Apple News is a direct connection to more than 145mn consumers, with tens of millions subscribing to the premium News+ service. While they (and their Apple paymaster) know better than to publicise the financials, one would-be buyer of Telegraph Media Group suggested that the UK news brand might now be generating as much as 4% of its £260mn revenue from Apple News+.
A former Daily Beast staffer reported in Semafor that the digital tabloid had joined Apple News+ in 2023: “The program made all of the publication’s buzziest exclusives available to paying Apple subscribers, behind Apple’s own paywall. And the impact for a mid-sized news site was immediate, putting the Beast on track to make between $3-4mn in revenue this year from Apple News alone — more than its own standalone subscription program, and without much additional cost.”
For all the publisher nervousness about the role of Apple as an intermediary imposed on their core relationship with readers, the financial success is starting to get them thinking about a future where Apple News+ might actually become the primary outlet for some news and lifestyle brands. After almost two decades of supporting other ‘All You Can Read’ services which were regarded as mere promotion and some ancillary revenue for print-centric brands, they are now daring to think about a longterm dependance on Apple News+.
But it is the publisher fears and Apple’s own protectiveness that has – so far – made this growing slice of newspaper and magazine revenue almost a secret industry. In financial reporting, some companies obscure the numbers by including the distinctive ‘All You Can Read’ royalties in either ‘subscriptions’ or just ‘digital revenue’.
One of the most interesting new companies to emerge from the booming Apple News+ “industry” is FlatPlan, a UK-based startup which enables publishers to deliver their content in a ’native’ format – which can be a tricky technical challenge: “We often describe our work as being akin to creating mini-apps – and publishers come to us because the audience is simply too big and too valuable to attempt with a basic output. FlatPlan’s software handles the design, the build and the delivery to Apple News, with tools to drive engagement. It’s backed with an expert team including a strategic arm led by a former Apple News Editor.”
FlatPlan supports every part of the platform – with a heavy focus on the subscription service Apple News+ which rewards publishers based on the ‘engaged minutes’ of content.
The company was launched almost 10 years ago by former magazine art-director-turned-web-designer Kieran Delaney who had honed his digital skills on FHM magazine. His Mathematics web agency (which, incidentally, built our own Flashes & Flames site) was invited by Apple to be a launch partner for Apple News in 2015: “Our team had built a first delivery mechanism for Dazed & Confused magazine and realised what a huge undertaking it was for an internal team. We caught the attention of Apple who helped to shape the product and this has led to a close relationship. We are now an Apple ‘Preferred Provider’ so we offer fast implementation, access to exclusive features and support from the Apple News team.”
But FlatPlan’s “arrival” as a key player in the Apple News universe had come when Dazed & Confused hit 1mn article views in a single day. Delaney says: “We now have plenty of publishers that reach more readers in Apple News than on their own website, so it’s essential this responsibility sits with experts. Apple News+ readers pay $12.99 a month for the service and Apple splits the revenue with publishers, so the FlatPlan tools and guidance can have a huge effect on our customers. Our job is to use data, tooling and shared knowledge to increase the share of revenue received by the publishers we work with and we have ’net negative’ churn: companies come to us and they stay for years instead of churning. We often work to very tight deadlines, and launch to very large audiences. We launched live blogs with The Athletic for Super Bowl LIX, allowing The Athletic team to cover one of the world’s biggest sporting events in real time. This kind of launch doesn’t just have to go well, it needs to run perfectly.”
An emerging component of the FlatPlan business is a separate revenue share model which allows publishers to create bespoke editorial and branded content. In the UK, it has helped The Telegraph deliver campaigns for HSBC, Singapore Airlines and others.
FlatPlan now claims 500mn article views a month which is 70% up year-on-year. It has a team of 16 full-time people and a raft of consultants, serving 175 consumer publishers including the New York Times Company, FIFA, Premier League Soccer, The Atlantic and JP Morgan Chase (via The Infatuation). Its biggest clients are believed to be Advance Local, Minute Media and ITV News.
It takes FlatPlan an average of three weeks to get a publisher up and running on Apple News+.
Its estimated “low millions of dollars” of revenue in 2024 (65% from the US and 30% UK) almost doubled in the year and growth is said to be accelerating rapidly. FlatPlan may be in sight of £10mn revenue (maybe by 2027-8), most of which is recurring from software licenses that are charged monthly or annually. It likely has EBITDA margins of 30%+.
The company’s appeal is further enhanced by Delaney’s claim that “There is no comparison product to us of any scale. Our ‘competitors’ are publishers building delivery internally, and the vast majority of new business is from publishers that have attempted to build in-house, seen some success and come to understand it’s time to take Apple News seriously. The biggest, most well-resourced publishers choose to move to us because we are a long way ahead of any internal team. We have unique data and understanding about the platform. So, while internal teams might be trying to understand how personalisation works, we’ve figured that out and we’re steps ahead, using AI to help our publishers understand when and how to target audiences – and maximise revenues.”
There seems no reason to doubt that FlatPlan’s rapid growth has really only just begun, simply because of the soaring appeal of Apple News itself. As soon as an Apple News reader starts to use the app, it begins to offer a personalised experience and curates stories around everything from breaking news to weekend reads, and it increasingly supports local publishers with dedicated content. The app also includes a huge catalogue of audio articles narrated by voice actors, plus live sports coverage, puzzles, exclusive articles and, now, Food, including recipes with interactive shopping lists and cooking timers built into the operating system. In ways that must still worry publishers (even as they are enjoying the profits), Apple News has become a huge and growing ecosystem that is captivating readers.
Apple News+ has proved itself as a solid subscription product in the four territories in which it’s available, and growth continues to accelerate. And with 2.2bn Apple devices worldwide, the service may be nowhere near a ceiling – which offers a serious opportunity for publishers accepted onto the platform and those wondering how to get involved.
What’s, arguably, so exciting for publishers is how vital ‘active minutes’ are to monetisation. The time spent with an article is much more important than the sheer number of clicks. The Apple success shows just how profitable a focus on unique, high-quality and well-packaged content can be. Again.
FlatPlan seems perfectly positioned as a business that understands large-scale consumer publishers, in particular those with subscription products. As Delaney says: “We’ve built the trust of many of the world’s biggest media brands and, in five years, our vision is to be integral to every major quality publisher in the US and UK, and a large percentage of those outside of those territories. The most exciting part of that journey is building a team of experts – I am constantly astounded by the depth of insights and the pace our team moves at.”
The tiny London company has achieved this with just £130k of pre-seed investment (from Rob Walling’s TinySeed round in 2023). Its total investment in technology has been just £200k. Having resisted the temptation to take early investment cash, you sense that the time might be coming for the founder to move through the gears.
Trade and institutional venture funds are starting to seek out Kieran Delaney, hungry to share his “exciting growth path”. Our guess is that the little-known FlatPlan – which could surely fly higher and faster with, say, £1-2mn of investment funding – will be getting some enriching offers to help consolidate its place as the unrivalled Apple News catalyst. Maybe it will soon be moving out of the shadows and also out of its modest base off London’s Whitechapel Road. Just watch.
